The insufficiency of the legacy of antiquity

An excerpt from Costa Lima’s latest book, História. Ficção. Literatura (2006), this section briefly examines the exceptionality of Aristotle’s Poetics, and the history of its reception down to our own time; in doing so, Costa Lima reiterates the point made elsewhere (see Complement to the "Preface"), that 'the proposed and transformed conception of mimesis cannot be thought as a sort of recovery of the ancient Greek meaning. The Greek conception of mimesis was correlated to a cosmos conception which would make no sense to us.' But this should not lead to a discarding of the notion; rather, as Costa Lima stresses here, it leads instead to 'the importance of rethinking the concept of mimesis and removing it from the ostracism, stipulated by those who for centuries converted it into a tattered dogma. To do so, as long as we know how to distinguish it from the modern subordination to a certain state of society, where then its presence at the most would be to bear witness to the historical moment.